A Letter To My Dad

June 20, 1999|JAMES W. HALL

When I came home to say my final good-bye, I spent the day beside your bed and watched you enter and leave your dream state. Your hands moved through the air, pantomiming your reveries. In one of them, you reached out and plucked something that floated before you and brought it to your mouth and then you began to pat your chest with both hands. Mother asked you what you were doing and you opened your eyes and looked at her dreamily and said, "Strawberry." You had picked the delicious red fruit from the vaporous bush before you and brought it to your parched lips and then you must have assumed it had fallen from your fingers because you tasted nothing. Later on that day, we brought you a real strawberry and you put it in your mouth and said in your hoarse, breathless voice, "Very sweet."

After your final operation, the drugs gave you mild hallucinations. At first you saw disturbing things appearing on the wall across from your bed and when mother asked you what you were seeing, you said it was handwriting. She asked you what the handwriting said and you told her that it was a list of peoples' names. It was as if you were seeing in that handwriting on the wall, the invisible traces of all those people who had come before you. Finding your own place among the endless list of names. An image both unnerving and comforting, a poetic rendering of what you surely felt approaching.

Once when your condition turned grim and you were banished again into the ceaseless brightness and mayhem of the ICU, you instructed Mother to go home and get the Mustang convertible and bring it to the hospital because you wanted to ride home with the top down. Years ago you won that Mustang convertible, first prize in a contest you entered. It was just another of your goofy post-retirement hobbies, entering sweepstakes, contests of every kind. Often inserting my name or my brother's. There was one lucky time when through your efforts I was the proud recipient of a hamburger maker, a popcorn machine shaped like a Conestoga wagon, and a plastic picnic set, all of them won in the course of one week.

That in the depths of your illness you fantasized about going home with the top down, basking in the beautiful spring weather, seems to me perfect testimony to your playful spirit, your joy in natural pleasures, your whimsy. Even in the midst of the horrors of those final days, you knew, by god, what would delight you most.

It is a commonplace for men of my generation to complain that they never received their father's complete and unequivocal blessing. They never heard their father say that simple phrase, "I'm proud of you, of who you've become."

Well, I am happy to report that you, as naturally reticent as you were, managed to let me know in countless ways how proud you were of me.

I recall the mischievous pleasure you took in describing how you had repositioned my books on a grocery store shelf so they were more prominently displayed at eye level. An act that earlier in your life you might have considered a form of vandalism. I cherish the letter you wrote after reading one of my novels in which you described what had become your normal reading practice. You gulped the book down as fast as you could to find out what happened, then you read it slowly a second time to savor all the little things you missed the first time through. You were my perfect reader, Dad. My absolute perfect reader.

You practiced your own art in those marvelous wood carvings. It started out as simple whittling to pass the slow hours around the real estate office. At first you focused on the usual tricks. A long chain of interlocking walnut links. A ball that rattled around behind the bars of a wood box. But you moved on in the last few years to birds and fish and flowers and intricate tableaus of hillbilly silliness. A moonshiner stumbling over his own feet, jug in hand. And there was the replica of my dog Watson, anatomically correct, and there were the wonderful abstract creations, as silky smooth and elegantly polished and sensually suggestive as any Henry Moore sculpture. Chunks of wood that guided you into their hearts and showed you their secret hidden forms. You were an artist, Dad. As complicated in your tastes and as sophisticated in your technique as any artist I've ever known.